An enormous Thank You! The marathon definitely would not have been possible without all of our runners and walkers! Listed in the order in which they participated:

Steve Leckman
Sam Rovnak
Christopher Scott
Steven Kaal
Nick Annejohn
Christopher Adlam
Rosemary Roberts
Rocky Decoursay
Soledad Delgado
Giroflée Arsenault
Geneviève Huchette
Simon Meloche
Courtney Kirkby
Rick Peyser
Stephane Gunner
Olivier Huard
David Tacium
Anita Tapia Roussiouk
Eby Heller
Lyne Taillefer
Sean Kropveld
Joey Leckman
Julien Leckman
Benoît Côté
Guillaume Internoscia
Clémentine Sallée
Stephanie Dimitrovas
Madeleine Combs

Thank you a thousand times over, and may our rivers continue to run freely!

Fearless organizer and tireless marathoner Chris Scott poses at the end of the line: the Romaine River

(November 1st) They say that the longest journey starts- and finishes- with a single step. Throughout the six weeks, and over the fifteen hundred kilometers we covered during the “Run for our Rivers” marathon, the concept of endings mostly remained abstract. We realized that there was a point to be reached, and a message to be delivered, but we did not really internalize the fact that one morning we would no longer be getting up to provide support to runners, and that one day we would, inevitably, reach the final lap, the final kilometer, the final step.

It is fair to say that over the six weeks of our odyssey the significance of the event grew on us, and one of the things I remember from running my own marathon was the feeling of how easy it would be to give up. When you are alone on a country road with only a driver or a small team behind you, it seems so inviting to give in to the grinding pain that begins to gnaw at you after kilometer, say, thirty-five. And if you continue despite the temptation, it is because you see some individual or collective gain, some tangible enrichment of our quality of life that is to be had for protecting a portion of our province’s incredible wild spaces. And it is also because you recognize that a political battle, like a marathon itself, is long and arduous, and that, as in a marathon, the qualities of vision, exertion and relentlessness are our surest guarantors of success.

In total, there were twenty-eight of us, runners and walkers, women and men, athletes of all backgrounds, to carry the letter written by Cree hunter Roger Orr across the province of Quebec. And, as one of the organizers, it fell to me on Monday, October 19th, to relay the message over the last leg into the Innu community of Ekuanitshit, that stands a few kilometers from the Romaine.

I remember balancing the “talking stick” between my fingers, traversing the towns of Rivière-Saint-Jean and Longue-Pointe, and catching an occasional glimpse of the sea-like Saint Lawrence with large islands spread against the horizon. It was a testimony to how far we had come that a thirty-two kilometer hike seemed such a short distance now. I walked for most of the afternoon, and there were a couple stars pointing above the evergreens when I rounded a bend in the highway and came within sight of the streetlights of Ekuanitshit.

I knew I was to deliver the message to Rita Mestokosho, an Innu poet and Band Council woman who had spent most of the past year fighting the proposed dams along the Romaine River, which forms the core of Ekuanitshit’s traditional hunting ground. But I did not know exactly where Rita’s house was, and it was by serendipity that as I stumbled around in the half-light, wondering whom to ask for directions, I saw a wiry silhouette standing on a veranda that I seemed to recognize from an earlier meeting as Rita’s.

“I knew it was you right away,” she told me later. I suppose skinny white guys on foot carrying talking sticks don’t exactly blunder into Ekuanitshit every day. Rita sat me down to a plate of spaghetti, and it seemed that over the next two hours we talked about nothing and everything. Rita was just back from Sweden, where she had attended the launching of a bilingual collection of her poetry- in French and Swedish. The book was dedicated to the Romaine River, and featured some unbeatable photos. We talked about an international writers’ retreat that Rita had hosted that summer on Innu territory, about culture and continuity, and also about the state of local politics, now that Hydro Quebec had started ground-breaking operations near the dam site.

Chris Scott and Ekuanitshit chief Jean-Charles Piétacho

The next day, Rita and I conveyed Roger Orr’s message to Ekuanitshit chief Jean-Charles Piétacho, and afterwards, because I had spent a couple nights in a cabin near the Romaine, Rita and her sister drove me to the site to pick my stuff up.

While Rita and I posed for a photo at the Romaine’s estuary, I stood still for a moment and tried to take stock of our situation. Without a doubt, the Romaine is a mighty river. Emptying into a national park that is visited annually by thousands of kayakers and tourists; drawing water down from the Labrador highlands into the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. Its currents are by turns crystalline and opaque, frequently impetuous, always rich in nutrients, and ever ready to provide renewal to a traveler that has come here at the end of a long road. Glancing around me at the conifers, tall, proud as spears, rising above the wave-washed rock, I felt a sense of accomplishment, not simply because we had come the distance, but because we had managed to gather around us a cluster of valuable allies. Virtually everybody who lives on the North Shore has a favourite river, and what we were beginning to realize is that if we allow the provincial government to continue announcing its hydroelectric projects one river at a time, sooner or later we will all be left bereaved.

The generation, or generations, that ran this marathon are blessed with a choice, in that together we have enough wits and resourcefulness and fighting spirit to force this government to back down. Together we can devise pressure tactics to insist that a portion of the eight billion dollars that are being mismanaged on the Romaine project be reallocated towards investments in energy conservation and renewable energy. We can oblige the Charest government to publish a list of the North Shore rivers it intends to dam as part of its 8000 megawatt initiative, and in doing so we can draw the debate about energy policy out of the boardrooms, and back into the public sphere where it belongs.

Doing this will not be easy, and it may take marathon-type determination. But the reward, for us and for future generations, will be to live in a spectacular province, with free-flowing rivers, a thriving fishery, a high standard of living, and a population that is aware and proud of what it has achieved.

This future can be ours, and it is worth working for.

Alliance Romaine would like to thank you all for the care, support and attention you have supplied us during our six-week marathon. We promise to keep you abreast of events as we prepare for our spring campaign season, and we give you our solemn pledge to consider and involve you in this struggle until our rivers receive the protection that they deserve!

For the love of our rivers, and wild spaces!

Chris, with the Alliance Romaine team

Click here to read the letter from Roger Orr

Steve Leckman, a core member of Alliance Romaine and second-time marathoner, running over the Sheldrake River

When we started this marathon in early September, it was still important to worry about heat stroke, and we could, and did, jump in a lake to cool off after a hard day’s run. The other day, as I was breaking the hard frost off my tent zipper so I could get up in the morning, I realized both how far, and how long we had been running. There is a sense of poignancy that comes with approaching endings, and as our trek entered its final week, we faced a new set of challenges, but we also encountered new rewards.

Taking the Relais Nordik ferry between Rimouski and Sept-Îles, I remember feeling the butterflies in my stomach. I was convinced that Sept-Îles, like most of the North Shore, was a blue collar community 99% sold on the Romaine project, and eager for more. What kind of an impact, or for that matter reception, would we have here? To be sure, the outgoing, and cosmopolitan staff at the Sept-Îles youth hostel were supportive of our message, but I took this to be an exception. Still, as I spent the next few days talking to media, meeting candidates for the upcoming municipal elections, and accepting rides from locals, I realized that opinion here, as everywhere, is more nuanced.

Without a doubt, many North Shore residents support the Romaine project, but now that the construction site is actually open, there is a realization that the dams do not represent the economic cure-all that was promised. In the village of Havre Saint-Pierre, located twenty kilometers from the Romaine’s estuary, young men are abandoning the fishing industry to go work for Hydro Quebec. With an influx of workers from outside the community, the cost of rent has skyrocketed, and the town is living through the consequences of a sort of localized Dutch Disease, a rapid, and asymmetric boom that does not trickle equally into all sectors of the economy, and may actually leave Havre Saint-Pierre worse off than before once the construction at the Romaine site is finished. At the same time, many of the supply contracts that were expected have not gone to North Shore companies, meaning there are fewer spin-off jobs in the region, and that many locals have less to gain from the megaproject than they had hoped.

Runner and avid Alliance Romaine supporter Clementine Sallée enters Trois-Pistoles

(Oct. 15th) One question that we marathoners regularly face- on the radio, in private conversations, and in town hall meetings- is “do you think you guys can win?”. “Granted,” they tell us, “that your arguments may be valid. The fact remains that the Romaine is an eight billion dollar project; preliminary work has started, supply contracts have been signed- do you really think that the provincial government and Hydro Quebec are going to just throw in the towel?” And whenever we attempt to answer this- legitimate- question, we invariably find ourselves bringing up the example of Trois-Pistoles.

Located on the south shore of the St. Lawrence between Rivière-du-Loup and Rimouski, Trois-Pistoles is well known to Quebecers as the site of Echofête, a yearly environmental rendez-vous and organic goods fair that is held in July. But what is less widely appreciated is that the Echofête was born out of the hard work of a group local activists who originally banded together to save the Trois-Pistoles River, on the outskirts of town.

In 2002, the PQ government was promoting a policy of micro-hydro. Private contractors were encouraged to build dams on small rivers and sell the energy to Hydro Quebec, as part of a foot-in-the-door strategy intended to lead to the gradual privatization of the state utility. A  Montreal-based entrepreneur by the name of Jean-Marc Carpentier had signed a contract to produce 3.5 megawatts of power on the Trois-Pistoles. In terms of generation capacity this was peanuts (compared with the 1550 MW that Hydro Quebec currently hopes to produce through four dams on the Romaine), but it would serve as an ideological precedent for the PQ, who, like the Liberals that have succeeded them, are hell-bent on reversing the progressive choice Quebecers made in the 1962 when they decided to nationalize the production and distribution of electricity.

But because Trois-Pistoles is a town rooted in its 300-year old history, and because locals remain attached to their river, with its spectacular falls, opposition to the dam project was strong. A coalition of artists and activists known as the “Amis de la Rivière” held protests, and uncovered compromising financial information related to the endeavour. In October 2002, Mikael Rioux, a tourism operator and local activist climbed into a tent platform suspended by a pulley system above the falls to block the bulldozers that were already clearing the construction site. For forty days Mikael stayed on the platform, enduring rain, sleet and snow, galvanizing public interest, and contributing to a wave of pressure that impelled the PQ government to declare a moratorium on private hydro.

So could the Trois-Pistoles model, with its recipe of local support, a successful media strategy, imaginative tactics, and even civil disobedience be applied to save North Shore Rivers such as the Magpie, the Little Mecatina, or the Romaine?

Last Sunday, we entered the town of Trois-Pistoles with high hopes, our message carried by Clémentine, an Alliance Romaine collaborator and activist lawyer who covered her half-marathon, 21-km distance in an impressive two hours three minutes. That afternoon, we held an animated exchange with a group of activists and interested citizens in Café Grains de Folie. It turns out that seven years on, while the Trois-Pistoles River remains undammed, it is under constant threat. Recently, the Liberal government of Jean Charest has adopted the dereglementation agenda of the PQ, encouraging not private developers but this time municipalities to invest in micro-hydro. This fall, the MRC (regional municipal council) to which Trois-Pistoles belongs is holding public hearings with a view to restarting the development project on the Trois-Pistoles River where Jean-Marc Carpentier abandoned it in 2002.

Several of the activists present spoke of the fatigue they feel having to oppose the same project, under different guises year after year, working all the time as volunteers whereas the municipal and private consultants have hefty public relations budgets to fall back on. They mentioned the stress of living in a divided community, with part of the population enthusiastically supporting the project as a form of economic salvation. Nevertheless, it was encouraging to sense the vibrancy, and notice the diverse make-up in terms of age, gender, and experience, of the crowd that was in attendance. In the words of Mikael Rioux, the idea behind the Echofête was to propose, not just refuse projects, and to show that there are viable options for promoting regional economic development other than damming rivers.

If the growth and popularity of the Echofête over the last seven years are any indication, these alternatives are guarantors of success. Échofête is a now a large-scale enterprise, generating direct revenue and attracting welcome tourist dollars to Trois-Pistoles.

Since 2002, Trois-Pistoles has earned itself a place on the map as a “green” community, and has inspired Quebecers through its example of successful citizen-based mobilization. But it seems that in the face of a hostile ideology in Quebec City, the protection of our rivers and wild spaces comes at the cost of constant vigilance.

This is a sobering, but at the same time a galvanizing message, that we will take with us as we venture further east.

Eby Heller, running through downtown Montreal, flanked by a multi-wheeled support team

(Oct 2nd) Environmental history was made last Monday morning when athlete Eby Heller ran over a small bridge spanning the Rivière des Prairies and set foot on the island of Montreal. After fevered weeks of planning, and nineteen days in the field, the “Run for our Rivers” marathon had finally reached its halfway point, bearing a message of love and reverence for Quebec’s free-flowing rivers from the edge of Cree territory, in Matagami, all the way to the province’s largest metropolis, and to the doorstep of Hydro Quebec’s head office!

There were a few moments of high drama as Eby’s run unfolded. My favorite memories include passing flyers while sprinting beside a bike convoy following Eby down Côte-des-Neiges; watching Courtney from CKUT Community Radio dash out of the station with her shoes untied to lope alongside Eby for a “running” interview, and experiencing an epiphany as Eby whipped round the corner from Parc Avenue, onto René-Lévesque and ventured into a thicket of media cameras.

Despite forecasts of rotten weather, the sky actually cleared for our brief demo, replete with whistle toots, balloons and a megaphone, in front of Hydro Quebec, that attracted twenty-some odd people.

Conspicuously absent from the welcoming party, though present in everyone’s mind, was Premier Jean Charest, without whose wrong-headed insistence on following an outmoded, 1970s-style energy policy this marathon might not have been. In a policy statement unveiled last year, known as the Plan Nord, Charest announces his intention to produce 8000 new megawatts of electric capacity by building dams on the North Shore, but he has been cagey about listing on what rivers specifically these dams will be constructed. If both the Romaine, and (as Charest has suggested) the Little Mecatina are dammed, the resulting electric capacity would still total less than 3000 MW. So where would the extra 5000 MW come from? Quebecers deserve to hear of a transparent long-term energy strategy that is based on more than hints, so as to make an informed decision about whether to support this strategy of not.

Jean Charest also needs to answer questions about the public environmental review process, the BAPE (Bureau des audiences publiques en environnement), specifically about why his government has tolerated an arrangement by which it is the promoter, and not a neutral third party, that writes the impact assesment for large-scale projects such as dams. He also needs to come clean, and explain in scientific terms exactly what he means in when he says that large-scale hydro projects, like the four proposed dams on the Romaine River, are green energy.

Because everybody, even a recalcitrant premier, deserves a chance to defend themselves, Alliance Romaine has written to invite Jean Charest to a public, televised debate about the usefulness of the Romaine project, to be held Oct 4th when Alliance Romaine reaches Quebec City. By doing this we want to encourage a culture in which energy policy, and other important questions, are exposed to full public scrutiny, and vigorously analyzed so as to favour the best option.

Although Charest has yet to take us up on our challenge, we have an ally in the National Assembly in the person of Québec Solidaire’s MNA for Mercier Amir Khadir, who has been very supportive of Alliance Romaine’s efforts, and it is our hope that in the coming days Khadir will be able to use question period to encourage Charest to try to justify himself more publically.

As these line are being written, Alliance Romaine is carrying the marathon eastward, with the goal of reaching the Romaine River on October 18th. Through the marathon, we seek to promote eight demands, including:

• a halt to the construction of four dams on the Romaine River
• a moratorium on new large-scale hydroelectric dam projects in Quebec
• an end to energy subsidies (selling electricity at below cost) to big businesses
• a reform and democratization of the public environmental review process (the BAPE)

If you would like to help in our campiagn, or for more info, please write to us at info@allianceromaine.org

Warm wishes to all!

Chris, with the Alliance Romaine marathon team

Premier Jean Charest has been oficially challenged to a debate about Quebec’s energy program, and in particular about the Romaine and other rivers. Click here to read our open letter to him (in French only at the moment).

Rick Peyser, a tireless runner from Vermont, entering the outskirts of Gatineau

Rivers for all Ages

One of the neat things about organizing a marathon is that you get to meet and interact with a kaleidoscope of gutsy, motivated and often inspirational runners at a time when they are being tested, and striving towards a far-off goal that it periodically seems impossible to reach. I’ve often asked myself what it takes to make an activist. What qualities or history would prompt a person to step out of the crowd to run 42 kilometers, say, to protect a river that the pessimists would have us believe is already lost?

As the “Run for our Rivers” marathon progressed through its third week, descending the Ottawa Valley and approaching the urban centres of Gatineau and Montreal, I found myself giving this question a lot more attention. Sometimes a biographical detail would jump out at me, but there seemed to be little underlying commonality beyond a propensity to follow quirky career paths, and perhaps a certain independent-mindedness.

Eventually, I concluded that the marathoners, in their diversity, basically represent all of us. There are natives and non-natives, men and women, young, old, city dwellers and country dwellers. No matter who you are, or where you hang out, you have something to gain from living in or near a province that still boasts free-flowing rivers.

Rick Peyser, a 59 year-old Vermonter, and up to now our oldest runner, put this well. “There are so few places like that left on the planet,” he told me, when I asked him why he had decided to exert himself for the Romaine. A seasoned traveller, and projects manager for a fair trade coffee firm, Rick is in a good position to make this observation.

Rick Peyser’s home state is, truth be told, a significant importer of Quebec hydro. But through the efforts of its citizens, a few years back Vermont adopted an energy efficiency programme which resulted in the state’s electricity consumption decreasing five per cent between 2000 and 2009. Now energy watchdog groups like Fondations Rivières are studying ways to import Vermont’s experience here to Quebec. Reducing Quebec’s domestic consumption of electricity by five per cent would allow us to free up as much power as is slated to be produced on the Romaine at a much lower cost than the eight billion dollars that Hydro Quebec is projecting for the Romaine project. By continuing to cultivate ties, and share info with Vermont activists like Rick, Alliance Romaine can go places!

Coming second to Rick in the category of age, but earning kudos in his own right is David Tacium, a 53 year-old language teacher and community radio host from Montreal, who scored our best time so far by finishing 42 kilometers in an incredible three hours and twenty-nine and a half minutes. David’s knack for clear-sighted analysis of problems, plus his raw determination kept him going. “This hurts, and we’re doing it because it’s worth it,” he told me. Last spring, when I showed David the online slideshow of a 2008 canoe expedition down the Romaine River, I could see his eyes lock on the screen, and I knew right away that his admiration for one of Quebec’s most beautiful rivers would carry him through the rigours of training and make him a valued ally.

Anita Roussiouk, ready to run!

On the final approach to Montreal, the Alliance Romaine message was carried by Anita Roussiouk, our youngest athlete at 16, who had the disadvantage of running in the rain, but stayed articulate and cheerful, covering the half-marathon (21.1 km) distance between St. Eustache and Laval in about two and a half hours.

Anita was the eighteenth marathoner to carry the message in an uninterrupted relay from Matagami, near the James Bay Highway where it was entrusted to us by Cree trapper Freddy Jolly. In all, Alliance Romaine is counting on about thirty-five runners to complete our cross-province trek, conveying the important lesson that hydroelectricty is not green, and that Quebec’s free-flowing rivers, while increasingly rare, can provide something of lasting benefit whether we are paddlers, commercial fishers, First Nations hunters, nature lovers, biologists, or just engaged citizens.

Stay tuned for more stories and adventures!
Chris, with the road crew for Alliance Romaine

Runner Giroflée Arsenault, followed by Geneviève Huchette on bicycle, crossing la Vérendrye Park

(Sept. 21st) As the “Run for our Rivers” marathon entered its second
week, we found ourselves in La Vérendrye Park, following the calls of
migrating geese as we headed south. It was without question an
uplifting experience to jog past dazzling lakes, dark rivers, and
soaring, wooded escarpments. But behind the curtain of natural beauty,
we could sense that something was not quite right.

Advancing at a runner’s, rather than a driver’s pace, you are more apt
to note the profusion of roadside signs announcing hunting, logging,
and, yes, hydroelectric reservoirs right in the thick of what is
formally called the La Vérendrye Wildlife Reserve. Clearcuts, both
long-ago and recent are periodically visible from the highway.

On websites, and to casual tourists, La Vérendrye is known as a park,
and roadmaps do much to maintain the illusion by coloring La
Vérendrye, and similar areas across the province, a dark green.

Montrealers out for a weekend might end up asking “What are these
environmentalists complaining about? Quebec has lots of protected
areas.” But out of the eighteen or so categories of “protected” areas
to be found in the province, only a small number, representing a
fraction of the total land surface of “protected areas”, actually ban
industrial activities like clearcut logging and dam construction that
threaten the long-term health of ecosystems.

Maintaining a perception of “green” spaces does much to ensure
citizens’ complacency, and to avoid the sort of tough policy debate
that might force a reluctant government to change its priorities.

And in much the same way that opinion-makers have been repeating
tirelessly that clearcuts and other degraded areas are “green”,
officials with Hydro Quebec and the Charest government have gone on a
PR blitz to the United States, Ontario and throughout Quebec
proclaiming loudly to anyone who will hear them that hydroelectricty
constitutes “clean”, “green” energy.

It might be helpful if these bright lights would slow down to define
what they actually mean when they say that hydroelectricity is
“green”. Do they mean that it doesn’t emit greenhouse gasses? This
would be patently false, because hydroelectric reservoirs produce
large quantities of methane from the decay of submerged vegetation. Or
do they intend to say that reservoirs don’t impact biodiversity?
Again, they would be wrong, because dams alter the downstream flow of
oxygen and nutrients, resulting in an impoverished aquatic
environment, and damaging the entire food chain up to and including
the commericial fisheries of the St. Lawrence and other large water
bodies.

Mr. Charest may succeed in pulling the wool over Quebecers’ eyes for a
while. But in the end rhetoric is no substitute for hard science, and
if our government persists in its current course of damming the
Romaine, and potentially the Little Mecatina and other rivers,  our
province will eventually face a hard awakening which will come in the
form of degraded ecosystems, a reduced quality of life, and lost job
opportunities in sustainable forestry, ecotourism, fisheries, and
other sectors.

That’s quite a message to bring out of the woods! But Alliance Romaine
is determined to pursue our run, and we believe that if a large number
of citizens stand and act together and speak with one voice, we can
achieve political momentum to block the Charest government’s
wrong-headed energy policy.

Together, we can promote our own vision, based on responsable
consumption, diversification of energy sources, and ecosystem-based
management.

Together, we can still avoid the worst.

Champion Rocky Decoursay after his run

(Sept. 17th) Alliance Romaine’s “athlete of the week” award goes to
Rocky Decoursay, a remarkable 36 year-old man from the Anishnabe
(Algonquin) reserve of Rapid Lake, located in La Vérendrye Park.

Soon after the “Run for our Rivers” marathon reached Val d’Or, we
encountered a major problem in the form of a participant who backed
out. A flurry of cell phone calls failed to resolve the problem, and
by Monday evening we were facing the prospect of remaining stranded
for an extended period in Val-d’Or without a marathoner to carry our
important message further south.

But luckily, as we were leaving the municipal library that evening, we
received an unexpected call from a Montreal supporter, who told us how
just a few days earlier she had met Rocky, a part-time runner (and
former gym teacher) from Rapid Lake. Rocky, it turned out was already
aware of our campaign to save Quebec’s remaining large rivers from
hydro-electric development, and by a twist of fate he was currently in
Val d’Or and was interested in helping us.

A few moments after taking that call, we were on the phone with Rocky,
who confirmed that, though he had never completed a full marathon
training, he enjoyed running, and would give it his best shot.

We met Rocky at 7:30 Tuesday morning outside the Native Friendship
Centre, and from the moment we shook hands with him, we were blown
away by his determintation. “I’ll run till I drop,” he told us (or
something very like it.)

It was a true inspiration to see Rocky take off, his limber body
moving beneath an orange jersey as he led our by-now trademark vehicle
with canoe-cum-message mounted on the roof  through the streets of Val
d’Or. When we reached the outskirts of town, he cut suddenly up the
hill to run on the bike path above us, and for a moment it looked like
Rocky was actually flying!

Rocky’s enthusiasm is impressive, but not wholly surprising when you
consider his history. For three generations Rocky’s community at Rapid
Lake has been dealing with the unwelcome consequences of a dam which
created the Cabonga Reservoir on their former hunting grounds. Since
the federal and provincial governments reneged on a resource-sharing
agreement in the 1990s, Rapid Lake has been besieged by logging
companies, and remains mired in factional divisions maintained and
exploited by the federal authorities in order to divide-and-conquer.

Broadly speaking, Rocky’s experience would corroborate first hand the
message that Alliance Romaine is trying to spread to all Quebecers,
namely that hydroelectric dams are not clean energy, because they
inflict grave and long-lasting harm on both ecosystems and
communities.

By mid-afternoon Tuesday, Rocky had completed his 42-kilometer
marathon (with some intervals of walking), but rather than stop, he
pushed on for a victory lap of 5 more kilometers!

During our first week on the road, Alliance Romaine has been touched
by the spontaneity, drive and courage of many people like Rocky who
have come forward to help us in different ways in our campaign to
protect Quebec’s rivers.

It is our hope as we continue our marathon to gather as many stories
as possible from communities across the province that have been
impacted by hydroelectricity, and to craft our demands and strategies
together so as to become a political force.

A marathoner’s greeting, and warm wishes to all of you!
From on the road, in La Vérendrye Park
The team of Alliance Romaine